The Housemaid (The Housemaid, #1)

by Freida McFadden

Do you know those movies about the scary cult of, like, creepy kids who can read minds and worship the devil and live in the cornfields or something? Well, if they were casting for one of those movies, this girl would get the part. They wouldn’t even have to audition her. They would take one look at her and be like, Yes, you are creepy girl number three.

there something wrong with me that I am scared this nine-year-old girl is going to murder me?

I wonder if she would feel the same way about me if she knew I spent the last ten years of my life in prison.

Nina peers down at the doorknob, as if noticing it for the first time. “Oh! I’m so sorry about that. We used to use this room as a closet, so obviously we wanted it to lock from the outside. But then I converted it to a bedroom for the hired help, and I guess we never switched the lock.”

I shut the door, I notice marks in the wood. Long thin lines running down the length of the door at about the level of my shoulder. I run my fingers over the indentations. They almost seem like… Scratches. Like somebody was scraping at the door. Trying to get out.

Nina’s moods are wildly unpredictable. At one moment, she’s hugging me and telling me how much she appreciates having me here. In the next, she’s berating me for not completing some task she never even told me about. She’s flighty, to say the least. And Cecelia is a total brat, who clearly resents my presence here. If I had any other options, I would quit. But I don’t, so I don’t. The only member of the family who isn’t completely intolerable is Andrew.

Haloperidol is an antipsychotic medication, used to treat schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, delirium, agitation, and acute psychosis.

“As long as you’re not eating in front of Cecelia.” He tilts his head. “Why?” “You know. Because she’s allergic.” They really don’t seem very respectful of Cecelia’s deadly peanut allergy in this household. Even more surprising, Andrew laughs. “No, she’s not.” “Yes, she is. She told me she is. The first day I was here.”

I shouldn’t think that. Nina is my boss. She gives me paychecks and a place to live. My loyalty is to her. But at the same time, she’s awful. She’s a slob, she’s constantly telling me conflicting information, and she can be incredibly cruel. Even Enzo, who’s got to be two hundred pounds of solid muscle, seems afraid of her.

“Also,” she adds, “I’d thank you not to refer to me as Nina—I’m not your drinking buddy.” She snickers at the other women. “It’s Mrs. Winchester. Don’t make me remind you again.” I stare at her, flabbergasted. On the very first day I met her, she instructed me to call her Nina. I’ve been calling her that the entire time I’ve been working here, and she’s never said a word about it.

“Sei pazzo!”

“It was horrible…” Amanda sucks in a breath. “She tried to drown Cecelia in the bathtub.” I clasp a hand over my mouth. “She… what?” She nods solemnly. “Nina drugged her, threw her in the tub with running water, then took a bunch of pills herself.”

“I’m sorry to bother you like that, Miss Calloway. But we have a lot of problems with shoplifters, so I had to take it seriously. And I got a phone call alerting me that a customer matching your description might be planning to take something.”

“Not really.” She glances over at the other end of the sofa, and now I notice she’s got a stack of clothing next to her. It’s the same clothing that she insisted I take from her when I first started working here. “What is my clothing doing in your room?” I stare at her as a flash of lightning brightens the room. “What? What are you talking about? You gave me those clothes.” “I gave them to you!” She lets out a barking laugh that echoes through the room, only partially drowned out by the crack of thunder. “Why would I give my maid clothing worth thousands of dollars?” “You”—my legs tremble beneath me—“you said they were too small on you. You insisted that I take them.” “How could you lie like that?” She takes a step toward me, her blue eyes like ice. “You stole my clothing! You’re a thief!”

He looks down at his watch. “It’s eight in the morning. He’s always here. There are a dozen other families he works for—why is he always here?”

Andrew disappears through the front door, something restrains me. It takes me a second to realize that Enzo has grabbed my arm. I turn around to look at him. His expression has completely changed since Andrew went back into the house. His dark eyes are wide as they stare into mine. “Millie,” he breathes, “you must get out of here. You are in terrible danger.” My mouth falls open. Not only because of what he said, but how he said it. Since I’ve been working here, he hasn’t managed to string together more than a couple of English words. And now he said two entire sentences. And not just that, but the Italian accent that is usually so thick that I can barely understand him, is far more subtle. It’s the accent of a man who is very comfortable with the English language. “I’m okay,” I say. “Nina is gone.” “No.” He shakes his head firmly, his fingers still wrapped around my arm. “You are wrong. She is not—”

“That’s not what I mean.” She nods at the phone. “I’m talking about the tracking app she installed. Doesn’t it drive you crazy that she wants to know where you are all the time?” I feel like I got sucker-punched in the stomach. Nina tracks me on my phone? What the hell? I’m so stupid. Of course she would do something like that. It makes perfect sense. And now I realize that she didn’t have to go through my purse to find that playbill or call the house the night of the show. She knew exactly where I was.

I flick the starter until a yellow flame shoots out of it. I hold the flickering light to the edge of the photograph until it catches. I watch my husband’s handsome face turn brown and disintegrate, until the sink is full of ashes. And I smile. My first real smile in almost eight years. I can’t believe I finally got rid of that asshole.

When I come out of her bedroom, Andy is waiting for me outside. He is smiling at me, his dark hair without even a strand out of place, every bit as gorgeous as that first day I met him. I still don’t understand why he picked me. He could have had any woman in the world. Why me?

But maybe I shouldn’t question it. I should just be happy. “Hey,” he says. He tucks a strand of my own blond hair behind my ear. “I can see your roots starting to show a bit.” “Oh.” I touch my hairline self-consciously. Andy loves blond hair, so I started going to the salon after we got engaged to lighten my hair to more of a golden shade. “Gosh, I guess I’ve been so busy with Cece, it just slipped my mind.”

the door open and tugs on a cord to turn on the light. I blink as my eyes adjust to the light and I take in my surroundings. This is not a storage closet like I thought it would be. It’s more like a tiny room, with a cot pushed up into one corner. There’s even a little dresser and a mini-fridge. There’s a single tiny window at the far end of the room. “Oh.” I scratch my chin. “This is a room. I thought it would just be junk and storage stuff.” “Well, I store everything in the closet over there,” he explains, pointing to the closet near the bed. I walk over to the closet and peer inside. There’s nothing inside except a blue bucket. There are no papers at all, much less enough for searching through them to be a two-person job. I don’t quite understand what he would like me to do. Then I hear a door slam shut. I lift my head and turn around. Suddenly, I’m all alone in this tiny room. Andy has left the room and shut the door behind him. “Andy?” I call out.

Thirty minutes later, I’m about to go out of my mind. My throat aches and my fists are red from pounding on the door. I want to burst into tears. Where is Andy? What is going on here? Just when I feel like I’m about to lose my mind, I hear a voice from the other side of the door. “Nina?” “Andy!” I cry. “Thank God! I got locked in here! Didn’t you hear me screaming?” There’s a long silence on the other side of the door. “Yes. I did.”

“Don’t worry, Nina,” he says. “I’m going to let you out. I promise.” I let out a breath. “Just not yet,” he adds. “You have to learn the consequences of what you’ve done.” “What are you talking about? Consequences of what?” “Your hair.” His voice is filled with disgust. “I can’t have my wife walking around like a slob with dark roots showing.”

“Do you, Nina? Because I feel like if you did understand it, you wouldn’t walk around like a slob, with your dark roots showing.” “I… I’m sorry for that.” “Because you couldn’t take care of your hair, now you will give it to me.” I have a horrible, sick feeling in the pit of my stomach. “What?” “Not all of it.” He chuckles, because of course that would be ridiculous. “I want a hundred strands.” “You… you want a hundred strands of my hair?” “That’s right.” He taps on the door. “Give me one hundred strands of your hair, and I’ll let you out of the room.”

bathroom door, I reach for the handle and push the door open. And what I see when I get inside is something I’ll never forget for the rest of my life. It’s Cece. She’s inside the bathtub. Her eyes are closed and she’s propped up in the tub. The water is rapidly filling the tub, rising above the level of her shoulders. In another minute or two, it will be over her head. “Cecelia,” I gasp.

But the policeman just shakes his head. He turns to one of his colleagues. “She’s too out of it. Looks like she took a bunch of the drugs herself. Get her to the hospital. I’ll call the husband and let him know we got here in time.” Got here in time? What’s he talking about? I’ve just been sleeping all day. For God’s sake, what do they think I’ve done?

The next eight months of my life are spent in Clearview Psychiatric Hospital. The story, which has been repeated to me countless times, is that I took a bunch of sedatives that my physician prescribed to me and also gave my daughter some in her bottle. Then I placed her in the bathtub and turned on the water. My intention, apparently, was to kill both of us. Thank God my wonderful husband Andy suspected something was wrong and the police arrived in time to save us. I have no memory of any of this. I have no memory of taking pills. I have no memory of putting Cecelia in the bathtub. I don’t even have a memory of my physician prescribing that medication for me, but the family doctor Andy and I go to assured us he did.

According to the therapist I see at Clearview, I suffer from major depression and delusions. The delusions are what led me to believe my husband was keeping me captive in a room for two days. The depression was what caused me to make the murder-suicide attempt.

achingly clingy with me since I’ve been home. “Mama, up!” She raises her arms to me until I gather her up. She’s wearing a frilly white dress that is a bit preposterous for such a little girl playing in the living room—Evelyn must have dressed her in it. “Mama home.” Evelyn is not as quick as Cece to rise to her feet. She slowly stands up from the couch, brushing off her pristine white slacks. I never noticed before how frequently Evelyn dresses in white, which has always been Andy’s favorite color on me. It suits her though. Her hair looks like it might have once been blond, but now she’s just at that precipice between blond and white, her hair surprisingly thick and healthy for a woman her age. Evelyn is, in general, incredibly well preserved and flawless. I have never seen her with so much as a loose thread on her sweater.

“So here’s how it’s going to work, Nina,” he says. “Because I am such a nice guy, I’m giving you two choices. You can have the lightbulb or you can have blackness. It’s entirely up to you.” “Andy, please…” “Good night, Nina. We’ll talk more tomorrow.” “Please! Andy, don’t do this!”

“This is for you, Nina,” he says. “Look at the horrible choices you made in your life before I came along. You had a dead-end minimum-wage job. You got knocked up by some loser who didn’t stick around. I’m just trying to teach you how to be a better person.” “I wish I had never met you,” I spit out. “That’s not a very nice thing to say.” He laughs. “I guess I can’t blame you. I’m impressed that you managed to unscrew one of those lightbulbs though. I didn’t even think of that.”

And it’s not just me. If Cecelia does something unacceptable, I’m the one who gets punished. He has purchased a wardrobe of itchy, frilly dresses that she hates, that the other children make fun of her for wearing, but she knows if she doesn’t wear them or gets them dirty, her mother will disappear for days (likely naked, to teach me clothing is a privilege). So she obeys.

And he’s very clear that if I try to get away from him, Cecelia will pay the price. He already almost drowned her. His other favorite way to taunt me is keeping a jar of peanut butter in our pantry, even though he knows that she’s allergic. I have thrown it away dozens of times, and it always reappears—and sometimes I get punished for the transgression. Thankfully, it’s not a life-threatening allergy—she just breaks out in welts all over her body. Every once in a while, he slips a little bit into her dinner, just to prove a point when the itchy, uncomfortable rash sprouts after our meal has ended.

glance over her shoulder to see what has grabbed her attention. I roll my eyes when I figure it out. It’s Enzo, the local landscaper who we hired to work on our yard a couple of months ago. He does a good job—always works hard and never makes excuses—and he’s admittedly pretty easy on the eyes. But it’s crazy the way everyone who comes to our house when he’s working slobbers over him and then suddenly remembers they have some yard work they need done.

In the last five years, every single person I have told about the things Andy has done to me—the police, the doctors, my best friend—has called me crazy. Delusional. I have been locked up for talking about what he has done to me. But here is a man who wants to hear the truth. He will believe me. So as we stand on my front lawn on this beautiful sunny day, I tell Enzo everything. I tell him about the room in the attic. I tell him some of the ways Andy has tormented me. I tell him about finding Cecelia unconscious in the bathtub. It was years ago but I remember her face under the water like it was yesterday. I tell him everything as his face grows darker and darker.

few days later, I drive Cecelia to school like I do almost every day. She’s got her yellow hair in flawless twin braids behind her head and she’s wearing one of her pale frilly dresses that make her stand out among her classmates. I’m scared other kids make fun of her because of those dresses, and she can’t play in them like she wants to. But if she doesn’t wear them, Andy punishes me for it.

Step Eight: Find a Replacement I can’t pick just anyone. First of all, she has to be beautiful. More beautiful than I am, which shouldn’t be hard since I’ve deliberately let myself go the last few years. She has to be younger than me—young enough to give Andy the children he so badly wants. She has to look good in white. He loves that color. And most of all, she has to be desperate. Then I meet Wilhelmina Calloway. She’s everything I wanted. The dowdy clothing she wears to her interview can’t conceal how young and pretty she is. She’s desperate to please me. And then when the simple background check I run reveals a criminal record, I know I’ve hit paydirt. This is a girl who will be desperate for a decent, high-paying job.

This will only work if three things happen:

Millie and Andy have a mutual attraction. Millie hates me enough to sleep with my husband. They have the opportunity.

It won’t happen with me. Not with the IUD sitting snugly in my uterus. And Andy is going to discover I’m barren, because the private investigator Enzo found for me managed to get a few great photographs of the fertility specialist with a woman who isn’t his wife of twenty-five years. All the good doctor has to do is tell Andy there’s no chance I’ll ever get pregnant, and those photographs go in the garbage.

“Do you see the three books I left you on the floor of the room?” The textbooks he left in the middle of my room, the ones I almost tripped over last night, are still right where he left them. “Yes…” “I want you to lie on the floor of your room and balance them on your stomach.” “Excuse me?” “You heard me,” he says. “I want you to balance those books on your stomach. For three straight hours.” I stare at the door, imagining the twisted expression on Andrew’s face. “You’re joking, right?” “Not even a tiny bit.” I have no idea why he’s doing this. This isn’t the Andrew I fell in love with. It’s like he’s playing some sort of bizarre game with me. I don’t know if he realizes quite how much he’s upsetting me. “Listen, Andrew, whatever you want to do, whatever game you want to play, just let me out of this room and let me go to the bathroom at least.”

I had assumed Millie went to jail for some sort of drug crime or maybe theft. But no. Millie Calloway went to jail for something entirely different. She was in prison for murder.

Millie was passing by a bedroom and heard her friend screaming for help behind the door. She entered the dark room and found one of their classmates—a two-hundred-pound football player—forcing himself on her friend. So Millie picked up a paperweight from on top of a desk and bashed the boy in the head with it. Multiple times. The boy was dead before he even got to the hospital.

But if you look at those photographs, it would be hard to argue she hadn’t meant to kill him. His skull was visibly crushed. She eventually pleaded guilty to lesser manslaughter charges, given her age and the circumstances. The family of the boy was in agreement—they wanted vengeance for their son’s death, but they also didn’t want him branded a rapist all over the internet. Millie took the deal because there were other incidents. Things that would have come to light if she had gone to trial.

In grade school, she was expelled when she got into a fight with a little boy in her class who was calling her names—she shoved him off the monkey bars and broke his arm. In middle school, she slashed the tires of her math teacher’s car when he gave her a failing grade. Soon after that, she was sent to boarding school. And then even after her prison sentence, the incidents continued. Millie wasn’t laid off from her waitressing job. She was fired after she smashed her fist into the nose of one of her coworkers. Millie seems like a sweet girl. That’s what Andrew sees when he looks at her. He won’t dig into her past the way I did. He doesn’t know what she’s capable of.

And here’s the truth: I initially wanted to hire a maid in hopes that she would become my replacement—that if Andrew fell in love with another woman, he would finally let me go. But that’s not why I hired Millie. That’s not why I gave her a copy of the key to the room. And that’s not why I left a bottle of pepper spray ...

All along, I believed she was the crazy one. Now I don’t know what to think. She must have left me the pepper spray in that room. She suspected what he was going to do to me. Which makes me think he’s done it to her. Maybe many times before.

Was Nina ever really jealous? Or was it all just an act? I’m still not entirely sure. Part of me wants to call her and find out, but I suspect that wouldn’t be a good idea. After all, Kelsey never spoke to me again after I killed Duncan. I don’t understand why, because I killed him for her. He was forcing himself on her. But the next time I saw my former best friend, she looked at me with disgust.

Nobody ever understood. After I got in trouble for slashing Mr. Cavanaugh’s tires, I tried to explain to my mother how he had told me I was going to fail math class unless I let him feel me up. She didn’t believe me. Nobody believed me. She shipped me off to boarding school because I kept getting in trouble. That didn’t work out so...

And then when I finally got a decent job after getting out of prison, I had to deal with that bartender Kyle, who kept grabbing my ass every chance he got. So one day, I spun around and slammed my fist into his nose. He only didn’t press charges because he was so embarrassed that he got beat up by a girl. But they told me not to come b...